The army behind the armyPowell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
History
The army behind the army
Powell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
United States. Army; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
The mother school for land photography was located at Columbia
University, in New York, where the students received the same thorough
training which was given to the aerial operators at Rochester, with
instruction in motion-picture photography added. The students at this
school were the pick of the newspaper photographers and motion-picture
operators of America. Among them were men who had “snapped” presidents
and potentates, celebrities and notorieties, prize-fighters, reformers,
murderers, prelates, politicians and statesmen, leaders of society,
Society and near-society; who had “filmed” presidential inaugurations,
Newport weddings, railway disasters, yacht-races, South Sea cannibals,
Mexican revolutions, and Heaven knows what besides. Their courage and
resourcefulness were precisely the qualities which were required of army
photographers, for there was nowhere that they would not go, nothing
that they would not do, and the more danger there was in their work
the more it appealed to them. When a new type of gun was being fired
for the first time and the gun crew took refuge in the bomb-proofs as
a precaution against accident, the army movie-men moved their machines
up close in the hope that if the gun exploded they would get a picture
of the explosion. One of the Signal Corps operators, Captain Edward N.
Cooper, with his assistant, Sergeant Adrian Duff, while attached to the
Twenty-Sixth Division, crawled out into No Man’s Land just before an
attack was scheduled to take place, and, though exposed to both German
and American fire, set up their machine in order that the people at home,
seated comfortably in motion-picture theatres, might actually see the
boys going “over the top.” On another occasion this same young officer
became separated from the troops to which he was attached and found
himself under the fire of a German machine-gun, but in spite of the hail
of bullets he stuck to his work, made his pictures, and returned to the
American lines herding in front of him a group of Germans whom he had
captured single-handed at the point of an empty revolver. A camera-man
whom the French Government detailed to accompany me along the Western
Front in 1916 was seriously wounded by a German shell just as we were
leaving Verdun. His assistant helped me to give first aid to his chief
and then, though the road was being heavily bombarded, coolly set up his
machine and turned the crank while the wounded man was being lifted into
an ambulance. It is a striking commentary on the scepticism of American
audiences that, when I showed that picture in the United States, fully
half of the people who saw it insisted that it had been faked. Another
officer of the photographic section who, before our entry into the war,
as the representative of a Chicago newspaper had accompanied the German
Armies during the invasion of Poland, was present at the capture of
Warsaw. When the Kaiser reviewed the troops after his triumphal entry
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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